Yes. "Interstate" means the federal government pays for building and maintaining it. The name is a relic from the time people believed the constitution's commerce clause only applies to interstate commerce.

Yes, but they haven't been buying the personal loyalty of the troops, especially those in the combat arms. They haven't bought the personal loyalty of the recent veterans who know a lot about insurgencies either.

If I am engaged in attempting to get NSA spies to commit suicide out of sheer boredom, is that something the NSA would find interesting?

BTW, Nancy from the NSA, you know I like you and won't ever do that to you. Don't worry, this is just a joke.

It is too easy to eavesdrop on communication. There is no way to avoid it happening, whether by corporation, the government, or a criminal gang.

We could decide to keep ourselves safe by self-censorship and accept the loss of freedom of speech. Or, we can continue to act normally. If the government has to contend with 0.1% of the population who are loud malcontents, the malcontents have a problem. If the government has to deal with 90% of the population who are loud malcontents, the government has a problem. They can't put us all in jail or shoot us.

I'll be damned if I let freedom of speech slip away. We didn't get it because of government benevolence (see The Old Issue by Kipling), and we won't keep it by being timid.

The scaling issue is the shortage of competent researchers who can supervise untrained researchers in a useful manner. To do that you need to be good at research and good at mentoring.

I think (I was never in one) that the first tier universities allow even undergrads to interact with the world experts and do research under their direction (see http://web.mit.edu/urop/). This is a non-scalable function, which MOOCs can't do.

This is the reason MITx is such a good idea for MIT - it doesn't eat into their customer base, but that of lesser universities.

Udacity is doing a good job (based on my, admittedly limited, experience) providing extra training for mid-career professionals. That is a bigger market, for most industries, than college-age students who want to get into the industry.

When you have close to zero assets and close to zero skills, you can't afford to pay tens of thousands of dollars for general education. General education is great, but being able to support the family you'll one day have is more important.

Universities could get away with general education when they were cheaper, and before that when they were elite institutions for people who would inherit a large business anyway.

Also, your certification is next to worthless if nobody knows that it is. This gives you (and everybody you certify) motivation to get more people certified, up to a certain point.

Because a startup is obligated to serve those who need help that it cannot provide, rather than those who make the best use of its technology?

I meant the link to go to here. Sorry.

EDx makes good courses, IMAO. Also non-accredited. But maybe accreditation is what needs to go. We have a lot of second and third tier universities who can be superseded by MOOCs with no loss of functionality for our culture.

The certificates may be worthless. I don't know, I never tried to use them. But the skills they teach (Python programming, using AppEngine, etc.) are valuable. At least, in my corner of the real world they proved themselves so (this application uses AppEngine in Python).

Most of their courses have always been vocational skills (mostly IT and startups related). This isn't so much a pivot as a business expansion attempt that failed.

As you said, it looks like an oversupply of interested people. If I were you, I'd try to get into a different field or industry.